• A series of cyber attacks over the July 4, 2009, holiday weekend targeted a number of major websites in South Korea and the United States. These “distributed denial of service” attacks used coordinated barrages of requests to try to overwhelm and shut down servers. U.S. targets included whitehouse.gov, Homeland Security, the State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post.

• An infected flash drive inserted into a U.S. military laptop at a base in the Middle East compromised classified Pentagon computer networks in 2008.

• Over the past five years three large scale espionage operations — Operation Aurora, Night Dragon, and Shady RAT — stole intellectual property from companies in the information technology, defense, and energy sectors. The perpetrators were believed to be hackers, but accusations against China had to later be retracted. The incursions also targeted government agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, South Korea and Canada.

With reports of China and Russia trying to slip into the Pentagon’s information networks on a daily basis, U.S. security experts now rank the military threat from cyberspace just behind terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

In that atmosphere, the people whose domain has been the cubicle and the computer room are getting a chance to be recognized as “warriors,” on par with those who shoot guns and fly fighter jets.

Since 2010, the U.S. military has moved to erect barricades against attacks in cyberspace, including the creation of U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Md., to lead the effort.

The Navy re-established the World War II-era 10th Fleet as its piece of the cyber effort in early 2010. A few months earlier, it took another step that may have far-reaching significance.

Naval leadership created an “information dominance” corps that is bucking for equal standing with the Navy’s traditional “war-fighters” — aviators, submariners and sailors on surface ships.

It used to be that the Navy’s weather experts, computer operators, intelligence analysts and cryptologists — the service’s “geek squad,” some might say — were assigned to a windowless room in the middle of the ship or the back of the airplane.

But as the U.S. military pivots from the desert to the Pacific, the adversaries are sophisticated. China has not only the fastest-growing army but it tops the list, with Russia, of nations most likely to launch a cyber assault.

Aside from securing military computer networks against hackers, exactly how the military’s forces are waging war in cyberspace remains hush-hush. But late last year, defense officials revealed to Congress that the Pentagon has the ability to go on the offense in cyberspace.

“With respect to the cyber warriors, they may not need to do as many push-ups as a Navy SEAL does, but that doesn’t mean their combat is going to be any less rigorous or their training will be any less demanding,” said Rear Adm. Pat Brady, head of San Diego’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, at a ceremony to pin new information dominance officers.

Just as aviators earn gold wings, these “cyber warriors” are eligible for a newly created insignia. They must study aspects of all the information-centric jobs in order to earn it. Hence, the idea of creating a “corps.”

While it may sound trivial, it’s a big deal in the tradition-heavy Navy. Sailors are proud of their surface warfare pins that show a ship with crossed swords. Submariners earn insignia that depicts a diving ship. The information dominance version bears a lightning bolt crossed with a sword.

As of last month, 4,647 naval officers and 1,612 enlisted sailors have qualified for the new warfare pin, a Navy spokesman said. Roughly 12,000 Navy service members are assigned to 10th Fleet operations — most from the information dominance corps. They are spread out around the world, including at the Navy Information Operations Command San Diego at North Island Naval Air Station.

Separately, Navy personnel at a wide spectrum of commands do related work, such as intelligence officers on ships and meteorologists at aircraft squadrons. They, too, are considered part of the Navy’s information dominance corps.

The other U.S. military services have their piece of the cyber pie, as well.

The Marines created their Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command the same month that the Navy re-established the 10th Fleet. Both are at Fort Meade, alongside the Air Force and Army cyber commands. Each service is charged with protecting its respective networks.

About 800 Marines — most trained on signals intelligence, communications and intelligence analysis — work directly for the Marine cyber command, including a network operations center at Camp Pendleton.

The Pentagon rushed to form U.S. Cyber Command in the wake of a serious computer breach in 2008.

An external flash drive plugged into a U.S. laptop in the Middle East resulted in the military’s classified networks being opened up to outside eyes. The Defense Department, which in 2010 called it the worst-ever infiltration of U.S. military computers, said the malicious computer code was introduced by an unnamed foreign intelligence agency.

“If that had happened in a war (with the perpetrator), it would have probably cost us the war or put us at a minimum at a real disadvantage,” said analyst James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

That wake-up call was on the level of the Russians launching Sputnik in 1957 before the U.S. got a satellite into space.

“We realized we were behind in a new kind of game and had to move quickly if we were going to stay a great power,” Lewis said.

Analysts say that U.S. military networks are being probed constantly, often by automated fishing programs, with varying degrees of success.

China and Russia are in the secrets-stealing business, said Frank Cilluffo, director of George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute. Iran and North Korea are building their cyber warfare ability because they know they can’t yet fight the United States tank-for-tank. To date, terrorist groups use cyberspace for recruitment, radicalization and to study their targets, not to mount network assaults, he said.

But intents and abilities can change swiftly, Cilluffo said.

Why does this matter to people who shoot guns? Daniel Kuehl of National Defense University’s iCollege said there’s a reason that a new Chinese fighter plane bears a striking resemble to the United States’ F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

“If people are stealing the basic nuts and bolts design stuff of new weapons systems, that’s pretty important,” said Kuehl, a retired Air Force officer who teaches courses on national security in the information age.

In the Navy, there’s been some elbow-throwing about the new information “dominators,” as some quipsters have dubbed them. A Navy Times cartoonist penned a caricature of the cyber pin wearing taped-together geek glasses.

Purists might say a warfare job is one that directly causes the death of an enemy during wartime.

Others wonder whether the creation of a Navy information dominance corps is just window dressing. By wrapping these jobs together with a bow, does it change anything? One person called “information dominance” a bumper sticker catchphrase.

Some analysts credit the Navy for carving out more of a career path for the information specialties. A plan to have senior-level people cross train — an intelligence officer serving in a job normally filled by someone with a cryptology background — should produce leaders with broader knowledge and help upward mobility and retention.

“Navy has been kind of the leader in thinking about how to do this thing,” said Lewis of CSIS.

Capt. Bryan Lopez has served 25 years in the Navy after starting as an enlisted cryptologist. Now he’s the executive officer at Point Loma’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific.

He wears the information dominance pin, and he’s heard the criticism.

“There might be an opinion among the older generation: ‘You guys are looking for an excuse to justify yourselves.’ I would say that’s shortsighted. I would also say, you’re living in the past,” Lopez said. “I would say even people in my generation don’t have a good grip on the vulnerabilities and the potential ramifications of attacks that are happening today.”

He compares the coming of the cyber age to other sea changes in naval history. The battleship was eclipsed by the aircraft carrier. Now unmanned aircraft are taking their place next to manned jet fighters.

“The dreams of young people — I want to drive the pointy-nosed thing, I want to be in the war,” Lopez said. “There are a lot of ways to be in the war.”